Lone Star (an excerpt)

Lone Star is a novel based on the life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the Port Arthur-born Olympic athlete who became the dominant woman golfer of her era. Rouff's excerpt is set in 1950, with Babe at the top of her golf career and married, since the late 1930s, to the former wrestler George Zaharias. At the urging of her Fort Worth friend and mentor Bertha Bowen, she drives from Tampa to an amateur tournament in Miami to look at a tall, freckled, deliberately unpolished nineteen-year-old named Betty Dodd.

The excerpt covers that first meeting and what follows from it: Betty's refusal of the debutante life her San Antonio parents expected, Babe's recognition of a talent as rough as her own once was, and the beginning of the attachment between the two women that the historical record treats with discretion. It ends in front of a trophy case.

The journal filed the piece under fiction in its 2020 issue; the author's own headnote sets up the characters and the year.

Ruth A. Rouff is the author of two young-adult novels published by Townsend Press and of Pagan Heaven (Bedazzled Ink, 2016), a collection of poetry and prose.